


Rules and Regulations

by cassandramortmain



Series: Dispatches from the Refrigerator [2]
Category: Misfits (TV 2009)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Internal Monologue, Stream of Consciousness, Suicidal Thoughts, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:20:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28527624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassandramortmain/pseuds/cassandramortmain
Summary: Simon makes rules. He breaks them.
Relationships: Simon Bellamy/Alisha Daniels
Series: Dispatches from the Refrigerator [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2067915
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion to Refrigerator Girl, but it can also be read on its own. It's complete, and a new chapter will be posted once a day.

Simon has wanted to be a superhero most of his life. Which is maybe why he isn’t all that surprised when it turns out that getting superpowers is actually complete shit. That’s more or less the way it always is with life, in his experience.

Like: you think maybe community service will be a place that you’ll belong, finally, a place where you’re surrounded by other freaks whom everyone else hates so you’ll all have that in common, and that maybe you’ll actually, finally have friends. And then it turns out that in fact community service is a bunch of criminals who are wildly too cool for you and call you a pervert and a melon-fucker. And also you’ve got an accidental murder to cover up. 

Invisibility is like that.

*

The very first time Simon goes invisible, the first thing he does is walk right up to Alisha. He’s not entirely sure why.

He supposes, later, that he must have instinctively felt that if anyone understood what it meant to be visible, it would be Alisha. Alisha, smoking her joint and admiring her own reflection, and watching everyone else admire it, too. She knew what it meant to be seen. 

And so she would know, too, what it meant not to be seen. To be someone who no one would look at.

When he walks up to her, she doesn’t see him at all. Which answers his most immediate questions at the time.

*

As it happens, Simon does not have a crush on Alisha when community service begins. It simply doesn’t occur to him that he could. It would be like fancying a storm, or the sun. Unthinkable.

Of course he sees that she is beautiful. Alisha is beautiful, and she is poised and confident and funny, and Simon is who he is. They might as well be different species. 

They both understand as much straight away. And they respond in the way you do in such situations, which is to each ignore the other as much as they possibly can. When they can’t — when she touches him, and his mouth blurts out the plot of the last porn film he watched without his permission — it’s humiliating to them both.

So Alisha’s immediate and resolute indifference is, in its way, as welcome to Simon as Kelly’s occasional brusque kindness. Better than Nathan’s outright cruelty, and Curtis’s condescension. It lets him know where he stands.

But he does watch her. He won’t deny that. 

He doesn’t think that’s such a bad thing. Alisha is lovely to look at. And anyone can see that she likes to be watched.

*

Simon would deny, if asked, that he watches Kelly and Alisha invisibly in the locker room, but that would be a lie. That kind of watching _is_ a bad thing, he thinks, but he also can’t see quite where the harm in it is. They both would have behaved in just the same way had they been able to see him sitting there. They’ve done it before and will again: walk in, strip matter-of-factly down to their knickers, do themselves up again and walk out, and it doesn’t matter if he’s there or not. 

He’s done it himself. They all do it, and none of them, not even Nathan, leer at the rest while it happens, because there is a code, and they all know it. Even he knows it, and he must have been home sick from school the day they handed the rest of the codes out.

So maybe that’s the bad thing. Not that he’s there and they don’t know it, but that he is leering and they don’t know it. But they never will know, so what, he asks, is the harm?

And he can get so close to them when they don’t know he’s there. He can walk right up to Alisha and he can _smell_ her: something light and floral on top, like a perfume, and then the metallic scent of her sweat underneath. 

Alisha has a body. And it sweats. Astonishing to contemplate. 

He does contemplate it. Quite a bit.

And she never has to know about any of that, so what’s the harm? What harm is there in it at all?

*

Fact: Simon would like to be a superhero.

Further fact: Simon knows he is very, very far from being a superhero.

*

Sally he actually does have a crush on. Not when she first shows up: then he mentally classifies her as _adult, subcategory authority_ , like a mum or a teacher. He has trouble thinking of himself as an adult, too, even though he’s twenty this year. So Sally is inaccessible to Simon in a number of different ways.

But then Sally starts paying all this attention to him. She keeps smiling at him, and saying nice things, and they’re not the sort of nice things teachers say when they want to motivate you to achieve more. They’re the sort of nice things adults say to one another when they want to be friends. Like Sally considers Simon to be her peer. She tells him he’s more mature than the others.

Simon does think he’s more mature than the rest of the community service lot, as it happens. He doesn’t do drugs and he barely drinks and he respects authority, and those are all hallmarks of a well-adjusted person who can survive in a non-anarchical society. And someday Nathan and the rest will realize as much, and that will be a rude awakening for them, and Simon will feel very sorry for them then. 

Sally is a grown woman who is giving Simon _actual signals_ , actual signals even _Curtis_ , who knows how to talk to girls, recognizes and confirms to be signals, and Simon has never, ever been in this situation before. 

He asks her to get a drink and she says yes. He tells her about the fire and she holds his hand. He plucks up all his courage and kisses her and she kisses him back. 

The first time he’s ever kissed anyone. How could he not have a crush?

She tells him she doesn’t want him to come into her flat but he does anyway. This is probably worse than the locker room, because this time she has explicitly told him no, so he’s not just going off a general sense that he would be unwelcome. But she’ll never know, either, so what’s the harm?

*

When he kills Sally, he thinks he’s grasped what the harm is. 

*

Killing Sally is genuinely an accident. It is also the worst thing he’s ever done.

And it is also, in some strange way he intuits but cannot quite articulate, the most intimate thing he’s ever done with a girl.

The crack of her head against the door. The way her body tenses, and then goes limp. The smell of her blood and — and other fluids from inside her skull, and the way it mingles with the smell of his blood, from where she slammed his head against the mirror. Their faces close enough to kiss as her eyes go dim.

It mixes in his senses grotesquely with the memories of kissing her, holding her hand. The memories of sitting in her flat, watching her, while she moved about her business unaware. 

It all begins to feel, queasily, as though it’s part of the same thing. As though he’s been treating her like something not quite real, like a fantasy of a person. 

And now she’s dead, and that’s entirely real. And it’s all his fault.

He was protecting the others. He did it for them. She was using him, and she would have sent them all to prison. She was the one who attacked him first, there was nothing else he could have done, and he didn’t even do it on purpose.

It’s still the worst thing he’s ever done.

*

He puts her body in the freezer because he doesn’t know what else to do with her. He can’t bury her under the overpass, like Gary and Tony; the concrete from the environmental monitoring station is set now. And he can’t tell the others. He absolutely cannot. They’d never understand. So what else can he do with her?

He also puts her body in the freezer because he likes it. He likes having her propped up and watching him. It feels like walking into the moment just before he realized she was using him, when it still seemed like maybe a girl actually liked him and it wasn’t even because they’d both been committed to the same psychiatric unit.

It’s fucked up. It’s extremely fucked up. There’s something very wrong with him.

*

All his memories of watching now are slick with shame. To watch Alisha and Kelly like that, without their knowing. To enjoy their not-knowing. To know it was wrong, and to do it anyway. It’s all like Sally, somehow. It’s all mixed up with the idea of her dying, with the memory of her skull against the door. He wants to die himself from the horror of it.

He needs to make rules for himself, he thinks. Because there are certain people who instinctively understand what behavior is good and moral and right, and he is not one of them. 

There are people like Kelly, who are honestly kind and decent and good, not because they know they’re meant to be, but out of sheer instinct. And then there are people like him, who aren’t. People like him are why there are laws, and he should follow those laws.

That’s something, it occurs to him, that Alisha would maybe understand. He saw her — even though he shouldn’t have, and he knows why he shouldn’t have now, but all the same he did see it — use her power on Curtis, and he saw her not quite know, afterwards, why Curtis was angry. And then he saw her work it out, and then set a rule for herself, and now Alisha doesn’t use her power anymore, ever. Even though he’s pretty sure she liked using it back when she did.

Alisha is smart and capable, and she worked out a solution. Because she is a good person, too, just a different kind of good person to Kelly. The kind of person who doesn’t automatically know what’s good, who has to work for that sort of knowledge, but then does what she can with it when she has it. 

He can do the same thing.

So: only use your powers for good. Never use a power to take advantage of a girl. That is a rule.

Simon is good at following rules.

*

They have to try to rescue Alisha from a brainwashing cult of people who wear cardigans. Which means, he tells the others, they’ll have to put on rubber gloves, because of her power. 

He resents this need, a little. If Alisha were a proper superhero — like Rogue on _X-Men_ , or Gwen on _Angel_ — she would take this problem off their hands. She would wear gloves herself, and she would do it every day. She would cover up every last bit of skin on her body, because she would know that a touch-triggered superpower is nothing to be careless about. 

Simon finds wearing gloves very inconvenient.

But then, because he is trying to practice treating girls like people now, and not like fantasies, because that will make it easier to follow his rule, he follows the thought a step further, and he supposes that Alisha probably finds gloves very inconvenient, too. 

She doesn’t seem to like much to be covered up: she even rolls up the sleeves of their orange jumpsuits, and cuffs the trouser legs so her ankles show. Her street clothes are always little and strappy, both before the storm and after. Even the dress she’s put on after the cardigan brainwashing leaves her wrists and forearms bare. 

Does it simply not occur to her that her life would be easier if she covered more skin? No: he sees the way she and Curtis are around each other, the way they are hyper aware of the places each patch of skin touches air, and the way they place their hands so carefully, so as not to ever quite touch those patches. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

She must just believe that it’s worth it, he thinks, not to change her clothes. They must mean something to her.

An interesting thought: since she doesn’t use her power anymore, she doesn’t touch anyone. That’s normal to Simon, but anyone can see that Alisha’s the kind of person who has friends and a family. Probably every day of her life before the storm was like one of those bad American teen shows, where the friends are always falling into laughing piles of bodies, like puppies, at the end of every episode. And now Alisha can’t ever do that again.

The storm took something away from her. It took a life away from her. But she doesn’t let it take away her clothes. Like a tiny _fuck you_ every day.

That’s brave, he concludes. Alisha is brave.

Alisha is brave, and Alisha is probably the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen, and Alisha is smart and capable. And Alisha is a good person, because she bothers to spend the time to make herself a good person.

*

See? _Now_ he has a crush.

*

The idea of Alisha giving him oral sex is demonstrably insane. It’s not something he’s ever bothered even to fantasize about, because it seems so unlikely to happen. Instead his fantasies of Alisha tend to involve her by herself, beautiful and perfect, and him close enough to see everything but not so near that she can see him and have to deal with him near her. Like when he watched her invisibly before, only not wrong this time, because in his fantasy she’s improbably decided she’s all right with it.

And then even more improbably, in his real life, she’s getting down on her knees in front of him, and it’s so confusing he can’t even really enjoy it. Except for all the ways that he really, really does.

Is it really that mad? Alisha likes sex, she’s made that pretty clear. Maybe she doesn’t think he’s completely disgusting. Which he supposes she doesn’t usually seem to; she mostly just doesn’t bother to notice that he’s around. So all right, she’s someone who likes sex, and she wants to have sex with someone new, and she happened to notice that he’s right there. And also he’s pretty sure she doesn’t really care for Nathan, and obviously she and Curtis have their whole thing, so process of elimination. Boredom. Convenience. It could happen.

Well. It clearly _did_ happen. 

There is a small and wanting animal part of him that wonders perhaps if she might have had the same thought process he had. If she might have seen that they have the same trouble with their powers, the one none of the others have, where they don’t quite know what they’re allowed to do with it and what they’re not. They weren’t born knowing where the boundaries are. They have to work it out for themselves. They’re just alike that way, and maybe Alisha saw that too, and that’s why she did it. 

But Simon tries never to listen to that voice too closely, because it only ever leads to disappointment. 

Here is what he is certain of: it would be rude to say nothing to her. There are codes to this sort of thing; he has read about them. And he has decided, after what happened with Sally, that he is going to be the sort of man who follows codes when it comes to girls. 

When a girl smiles at you, you smile back. When a girl kisses you, you call her. When a girl tells you that no, she’s not going to invite you into her flat, then you go straight home, and you do not turn yourself invisible and creep into her flat and then film her while she sleeps. 

Simon has not read what you do when a girl gives you unsolicited oral sex. He has not expected ever to need to know. But most likely, he thinks, you are supposed to ask her out.

So he asks her out.

*

Simon is very, very wrong about everything, and also probably disgusting. He is disgusting to Alisha. 

Alisha doesn’t usually bother to be cruel to him, but she is this time. “Have you been wanking over me?” she asks him, getting in close and turning her voice syrupy. Then she tells him to go wank over Kelly and calls him a freak. 

Which only makes sense, he decides, after he works out that it wasn’t Alisha who had gone after him like that earlier. It was a shapeshifter. 

That means he wasn’t following the correct code when he asked her out. He thought he was doing the right thing, but actually he was violating their unspoken agreement, which is that he won’t come near her and she will in turn do him the courtesy of not seeming actively repulsed by him. So after he broke it she had to break it, too, to show him how wrong he was.

It’s that thing again, he thinks suddenly, of treating girls as fantasies instead of people. That’s what Alisha thought he was doing when he asked her out: that he’d made up a fantasy version of her in his head, a version of her who wanted him, and that he was trying to act as though that were the real Alisha. As though her actual wants and desires didn’t matter at all. So of course she got angry with him.

Alisha must deal with that sort of thing all the time, because she is so beautiful. She must be very tired of it. Simon can understand that. It’s like the way he’s tired of people treating him like a freak.

He can’t believe he didn’t assume it was a shapeshifter right away. He should have. As though Alisha would ever come near him on purpose. As though Alisha, who is a good person, would ever do that to Curtis. 

*

The shapeshifter turns out to be Lucy. And when he realizes that, when he follows after her to the police station to beg her not to turn them all in, it’s as though all the things Simon’s been thinking start to come together and make sense to him.

What he did to Lucy. He broke all the codes. A girl asked him out, and he didn’t tell her no but he also didn’t show up. That was wrong. 

And part of the way he broke the code was that he didn’t like it that Lucy liked him. Because Lucy isn’t his idea of what a girl he might like would be.

Lucy makes him uncomfortable. The way she so clearly wants his attention, his approval, with a needy voracious hunger that she doesn’t bother to hide. It feels disgusting to him. He is disgusted by her. And what makes it more disgusting is that he is certain, absolutely positive, that what he feels when he looks at her is what other people feel when they look at him.

There is nothing worse, he sometimes thinks, than for other people to know that you _want_. Humiliating not to be just a brain floating in a void, with no desires for anything from anyone else at all.

So Lucy makes him feel uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean he can’t treat her like a human being. He can tell her that she matters and is important, even if he doesn’t like her the way she likes him. That’s a thing he can do.

Instead he stopped treating her like a person. He punished her for not being a fantasy of a girl he might like, and then she went ahead and punished him right back, and that was where it all went wrong.

So he goes to the police station, and he tells her he’s sorry for walking away from her the way he did, because he knows how much that hurts. Then he asks her not to turn them all into the police, and she doesn’t.

Simon has also not foreseen a need to read up on what you do when a girl refrains from turning you into the police for two murders even though she could. But most likely, he thinks, you walk her home. So he walks Lucy home.

*

It’s like he’s discovered a cheat code for the universe. 

He tells Curtis and Nathan that he wants to be friends and they say okay and all of a sudden it’s like they are. 

Nathan still mocks him constantly, but in the same way he mocks the others constantly, where you can tell he actually likes them a lot and this is just how Nathan processes affection. And Curtis is still condescending, but less like he thinks Simon’s a freak for not understanding the world and more like he would like to help Simon understand the world.

He can’t work out exactly what it was he did that made it happen. Was it just asking them? Was it killing Sally for them? Was it talking Lucy down? Was it getting rid of Sally’s body together, all of them, as a group? 

He’s not sure, but it’s linked in his head to the thing he’s been starting to think about. About how there are codes, and he should follow them, and the thing that makes the codes work is they’re all about remembering that everyone else is a human being and he should respect them. It’s like somehow it makes them respect you back.

Kelly’s the same as she always is, but then Kelly’s just genuinely a kind person. And Alisha reverts back to the way she was before the whole mess with Lucy, where she only acknowledges him when she has to, but honestly he appreciates that. It would be too confusing, if she started to be friendly with him so soon after he misunderstood everything. He would always be on eggshells waiting to misunderstand her again. But indifference is easy for Simon to understand.

*

The guy with the mask is a real superhero. Simon can tell just from looking at him. He can do parkour, and throw a paper airplane across the lake and right into Kelly’s eye, and he’s always there when they need someone to rescue them.

Which doesn’t mean the guy with the mask means well for them. Clearly he has purposes of his own. They’re murderers and he’s a superhero; he could be planning to turn them in. He could be saving their lives now only to turn on them when the time comes. Lulling them into a false sense of security before he strikes. 

They need more information, Simon decides, and because he’s the only one in the group who takes this sort of thing seriously, because he’s the only one in the group who’s read enough comics to know what genre he’s in, he decides that he will have to go and get that information.

*

Fact: Simon would still very much like to be a superhero. 

And after all he does have superpowers now. And friends. And weird things keep happening around them with alarming regularity. They could do something about it. It wouldn’t be that mad to try.

He tells the rest of them they should do something about the man with the car and the gun. And Alisha says she thinks they should too. And she looks right at him when she says it.

*

It’s like Alisha can tell the way he feels about her. 

He is positive, entirely certain, that he’s not doing anything to give himself away. He is careful not to say anything to her that he wouldn’t say to any of the others. He is careful not to stare at her, at least not when she might notice. He actually doesn’t want to look at her that often, because it’s gotten sort of overwhelming when he does. Like looking at the sun.

Alisha has enough to deal with; she doesn’t need to deal with him blundering up to her with all his feelings, again.

But she must have some sort of beautiful girl sensor, like a spidey sense that goes off every time someone new falls in love with her, because suddenly she’s acting differently around him.

First she buys him a drink at lunch and makes him a formal apology for ever being a bitch to him. And when he tells her the truth, which is that he doesn’t think she is a bitch, she starts crying. 

Also she’s always watching him now. He would be a hypocrite to complain about someone staring at him, but the way she watches him is so confusing: speculative, as though she’s waiting for him to confirm some suspicion she has about him. And he can’t tell if she wants him to do it or not. 

It’s not just the way she is with him in particular that’s confusing, though. He’s pretty sure Alisha has some sort of secret.

She starts showing up to community service even later than usual, always with her eyes hazy and warm and a smile playing around her lips. She is glowing with some clandestine knowledge. And what makes it all the stranger is that sometimes he could swear she smiles that secret smile at _him_ , as though he knows whatever it is, too, and the both of them are delightfully in on the secret together. 

He doesn’t know what the secret is. He’s got no clue. But it’s so nice every time she smiles at him like that, and for just a second he can feel safe and warm and sheltered under that smile, sharing a hidden story just with her. 

*

Then Alisha stops smiling at him like that. She stops smiling at all, and starts to come to community service with her makeup smudged around her eyes and wearing a hoodie that covers all of her arms, which strikes him as a very bad sign indeed.

She and Curtis have split up, which explains it. And Curtis has gone out and gotten himself a new girlfriend immediately. It must have hurt Alisha very badly. Simon supposes she must have loved Curtis a great deal. 

The thing is, she still looks at Simon all the time. She hasn’t stopped waiting for him to do whatever the thing is that she suspects he’s going to do. 

It’s driving him mad. He’d do it if he could, if he knew what she wanted from him. He would do anything for her.

*

Alisha starts to smile again, but slower and sadder than she used to. Alisha starts to smile a lot at him. 

Alisha meets him on the road and smiles right into his eyes and asks him to walk her into the community center. Alisha asks him what he’s listening to and tries it herself and then laughs and tells him Echo and the Bunnymen is really depressing. Alisha tells off Nathan for mocking him. Alisha finds a way to stand right next to him every time he turns around.

He is drunk on it, on her. The attention. He doesn’t know why she’s lavishing it on him. Is afraid to ask. 

He would like to die for her, he thinks very clearly. Sometimes he thinks that’s all he wants in the world: a chance to be a superhero and die for Alisha. He wouldn’t need anything else.

*

There is a girl at the community center who likes him. There is a girl at the community center who is pretty, and knows how to talk to people, and has options in life, and she is making it clear to Simon that she likes him.

So Simon asks her out, and he doesn’t think of Alisha once when he does it. It’s like Alisha exists on a different plane to Jessica, in some far off beautiful place he knows he doesn’t have a hope of touching. But Jessica is right there in front of him, and she is smart and nice and interesting, and she looks at him like maybe, if he is careful and remembers about treating her like a person instead of a fantasy and does everything right, she actually might like him to touch her.

Which is why it’s so confusing when Alisha shows up to his date. 

She shows up with Nathan. They followed him on his date, which strikes him as being the sort of thing he would do, and they both tell him they’re worried about him, which he’s pretty sure is not the truth.

Nathan Simon can make sense of. Nathan’s psychology is not that complicated. Nathan likes pretty girls, and Jessica is pretty, and she prefers Simon over Nathan, and now Nathan is jealous. That’s not hard to work out.

But he can’t work out what Alisha’s doing there. Or why she cares so much about whether he goes on this date or not.

He supposes it hasn’t escaped Alisha’s notice that every time he’s gotten involved with a girl, all two times, it’s ended with him bleeding violently from the head and them threatening to turn him into the police for murder. So he hasn’t got a great track record there. And Alisha is a good person, and she’s started to act like maybe she considers him a friend, so maybe she genuinely is worried for him.

She doesn’t need to be, though. Simon still isn’t great at reading people, but he is absolutely certain there is nothing wrong with Jessica. She is just a nice girl who likes him, and there aren’t so many of those wandering about that he’ll decide she’s a serial killer without proof. Not even for Alisha.

*

Simon is right about Jessica but Alisha is right about him being in danger. Jessica’s father goes after him with a knife, and he just has time to think that at least he won’t be a virgin when he dies, and then Alisha is hitting the man over the head with a fire extinguisher until he topples unconscious to the ground.

“You’re welcome,” she tells him, and she looks furious at him for some reason. Because he didn’t listen to her advice, probably, and now she’s had to go out of her way to rescue him. But she did it anyway, because she is so brave and so good and she looks out for all of them so much, even him. Like she’s a superhero.

They must really be friends now, he thinks. Which is at least a little bit of a comfort, when Jessica tells him she can’t ever see him again. He’s not a virgin anymore, and he’s friends with Alisha now, so either way his life is looking better than it had before.

*

Community service ends, and Alisha still smiles at him all the time.

She and Curtis both get jobs at a bar together. That seems terrible to him, getting a job with an ex you’re still in love with, but the two of them are perfectly friendly with each other these days, and if Alisha really is still in love with Curtis she never shows it anymore. Simon doesn’t understand it.

But they all end up at the bar most nights, and Alisha slips them free drinks while Curtis grumbles about how she’ll get them both sacked. She is nicer to all of them these days than Curtis is, which is one of the ways she’s changed since community service started. She used to like being the aloof one. 

And every time Simon walks into the bar, her face lights up. He’s not imagining it. It happens every time, and she doesn’t do that for anyone else. Not even Kelly, and Alisha and Kelly are basically best friends by now.

He doesn’t ever try to go to see her by himself, only as part of the group. All the same she always seems to end up next to him. Sometimes she grabs his sleeve, tugs him aside, whispers in his ear. Just random nonsense; whatever she happens to be thinking, it seems like. 

“Nikki’s going to fucking scalp Nathan one of these days. I can’t wait, can you?”

“I can’t believe you tried to pay for your drink the other night. That was really rude, Simon, and here all this time I thought we were friends.”

“I was listening to your depressing pretentious music, and I like that ‘Seven Seas’ song.” 

“I like that jacket on you, but you should leave the top button undone.”

And then she actually _reaches out and undoes his top button_. 

*

Simon has been down this road before, multiple times. He has received what appeared to be pretty unambiguous signals — signals much clearer than whatever is happening here — and he has been wrong about them. He has received them from someone he thought was Alisha, specifically, and he has been humiliatingly wrong.

And the other time was even worse.

That’s why he’s set himself all those codes and rules: so what happened with Sally would never, ever happen again. And he hasn’t had to consciously think about them for a while, he’s gotten so used to them. But with Alisha he is thinking hard about them. He is reminding himself sternly.

If a girl tells you no, then you drop it. 

He asked Alisha out, during that whole thing with Lucy. She said no in no uncertain terms. So he should drop it.

He did drop it. He was perfectly content to never speak to her again and just think about her from a safe distance, and then maybe someday die saving her life, as sort of an apology for the rest of it. He was absolutely fine with the status quo they had.

She was the one who changed it. She was the one who started smiling at him all the time. She is the one who is seeking him out now, all the time. He doesn’t know what she expects him to do in response.

He is aware that he has Alisha on a bit of a pedestal. He is fairly sure that’s not quite in the spirit of the rules. The rules are to think about how other people are human beings, and that means he should respect them, not about how they’re perfect, and that means he should worship them. He is trying, very hard, to think about Alisha as a human being.

Alisha told him no before, and he should respect that. But Alisha is also giving him every indication that she would like to spend more time with him. Should he respect that? What does respecting that mean?

Sometimes he thinks she’s angry he’s not picking up on whatever signals she’s sending him. She’ll talk to him, and he’ll say something polite and walk away, so as not to accidentally monopolize her, and then she’ll roll her eyes and scowl at nothing. Or she’ll say something funny and he’ll laugh, and then turn automatically to Kelly to include her in the joke, and Alisha’s smile will get a little bit fake. Even though he knows for certain that Alisha genuinely does like Kelly a lot.

It’s driving him mad, thinking about it. He can’t work out what she wants from him. He can’t stop himself from thinking that maybe she wants something really good from him.

One night she seems to find him particularly stupid, even though he can’t work out just what it was that he did to upset her. But she really is upset. She marches away from him, and she’s trying not to cry, and she’s not really succeeding. It’s terrible.

So he breaks one of the rules.

_Never use a power to take advantage of a girl._

He turns invisible and he follows her.

*

It’s not like it was before, back when he did this sort of thing for fun. It’s not. He isn’t going back to that. Alisha is his friend, and he is concerned for her. He is being a friend. He is finding out what has upset her so much. He is finding out what she has been so mysterious about. He is being a friend, and also a detective, and also a superhero. Batman is the world’s greatest detective.

Where Alisha goes to cry all by herself is a little abandoned warehouse at the edge of the estate. It looks like it’s probably filled with asbestos and rot, and it’s all locked up, but she’s got a key and she lets herself in quite naturally, as though she does this all the time. 

Inside the warehouse is a lair. It is a superhero lair. Simon does not have other descriptors for what it is.

It’s all bare cement, except for one wall. On that wall there are massive clocks, digital ones, that look like they used to be counting down to something, but they’re all at zero now. And they’re surrounded by surveillance photos. Photos of all of them. Mostly Alisha, but also Nathan, Kelly, Curtis. A few of him. A few of Nikki. Even one of Ollie.

The rest of the lair is kitted out as a flat, sort of, for someone who leads some sort of very disciplined and ascetic life. Weights, a desk, a shower. A bed. 

Butterfly cases. Like his.

Alisha goes straight to the bed when she walks in and curls up on top of it. From the way she does it, he thinks this is maybe a routine for her. This is where Alisha goes when she feels too sad to deal with the rest of them, and this is what she does. 

After a while she sits up and rummages about in her bag. Then she pulls out a photo that’s gone a little battered around the edges, like she carries it with her a lot. She holds it very tenderly in her hands, as though it is precious to her, and then she starts crying again.

The picture that Alisha is holding is a picture of her. In the picture she is standing in front of a sign that says, “Welcome to fantastic Las Vegas, Nevada.” In the picture there is somebody standing next to her, with his arm around her shoulder, and she is curled against that somebody’s chest and smiling at the camera in the way she smiles when she thinks about that secret she’s got. 

The somebody in the picture who has his arm around her shoulder is him.

He doesn’t really decide to become visible, but suddenly he is. He hears himself say, “When was that taken?” 

Alisha jumps and clutches the picture to her heart, like someone’s threatening it. He hears himself say, “Where did you get that?”

“Someone gave it to me,” she says, which doesn’t explain anything, at all, at all.

He says, “Who?” but she doesn’t say anything. Looks like her heart is breaking. 

He says, “What is this place?” 

“The guy in the mask,” she says. “He lived here.” 

“Who is he?” he asks.

Alisha looks helplessly up at him, and she says, “He’s you.”


	2. Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I think we always end up together,” Alisha says. “In all the timelines.”
> 
> Simon doesn’t think that’s true at all.

It’s like a joke. It’s like one of those awful good news/bad news jokes.

You know how you’ve always thought you want to be a superhero and die for the girl you’re in love with? Well, the good news is, that’s going to happen. And you’ll even get to date the girl in the bargain, too, which you didn’t ever bother to imagine doing.

The bad news is: now you have to do it. Now you have to date a girl, become a superhero, and die.

*

Fact: Simon would still very much like to be a superhero.

Further fact: Simon has no idea how to go about becoming a superhero.

*

Alisha tells him they should start dating so they do. 

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, he’s got a girlfriend. A girlfriend who is beautiful and brave and smart and funny and a genuinely good person who has always had friends, and who is so shatteringly out of his league that he finds it physically difficult to comprehend. He wakes up in the morning and he tells himself, _You’re dating Alisha now_ , and his brain simply refuses to accept it. He wants to write it on his hand to remind himself, but that would be weird, probably.

None of the rest of the group can understand it either. Kelly, because she is kind, says that she thinks Alisha sees a lot of potential in him. Nathan, because he is blunt, says that Kelly means girls like a fixer-upper, and obviously Barry needs a lot of fixing up. Curtis says, politely, that he’s happy for them, and then, much less politely, that if Simon ever does anything to Alisha Curtis will personally kill him. Simon appreciates that, actually. 

None of them know about the time loop. He’d almost like to tell them, just to see their faces relax: Oh, that makes sense. It wasn’t that Alisha lost her mind enough to date the weird kid for no reason. There’s a supernatural explanation for it all. 

But Alisha says the guy in the mask — him — the other him — anyway, he told her not to tell anyone about it. She wasn’t even supposed to tell Simon, even though she did end up doing it. Which the future him must have known about. Or at least Simon supposes he must have. Will have. Will do.

Time travel confuses his grammar.

*

Alisha tells him in the future he’s more confident. Simon supposes that if he could run up and down buildings and somehow sweep Alisha off her feet he would indeed feel more confident. That doesn’t seem particularly likely to help him now, though.

When he is not with Alisha, Simon tries to teach himself parkour. It doesn’t go well.

The guy in the mask had moved like something supernatural. Simon is supposed to be able to move like something supernatural someday. But he can’t even do a shoulder roll without falling on his face. The gap between the two of them is too big. He doesn’t understand how he’s supposed to bridge it.

He finds training programs online and grits his teeth and lifts weights. It’s terrible. He always hated athletics in school and now he’s found himself on some sort of permanent mandatory fitness course. He can’t imagine why his future self would ever bother to learn all this. Only he can imagine it, because he is doing it right now. 

*

Parkour is still easier than trying to date Alisha.

He doesn’t know what dating Alisha should entail. He doesn’t know what she wants it to entail. He’s got no idea what she expects of him.

He does his best. He meets her at the bar. He walks her to work, every day, and back from work again. He tries to pay for things, when the opportunity presents itself. 

She still smiles at him every time she sees him. Still pulls him aside, whispers jokes in his ear. She seems pleased enough with all of it. But it doesn’t seem like enough.

Should he get her flowers? Flowers seem like a pretty standard part of the dating code. But that would be so embarrassing, to carry flowers about all day. And Alisha doesn’t even seem like she’d like flowers. 

He’s honestly not really sure what Alisha likes, even after all that time watching her and thinking about her. Except that he knows she likes clothes, and parties, and sex. None of which is particularly in his wheelhouse. 

He isn’t really sure what it is, then, that he’s supposed to be offering her. Except that he reminds her of someone who he isn’t yet. Someone he doesn’t see how he’ll ever become.

But he will become him. Because he has to. 

Simon tries hard to remember that. It’s not like he’s got a choice in all this. He’s going to become the guy in the mask, because he doesn’t have other options. So he might as well stop worrying about all the rest of it.

Nathan tells him he should compliment Alisha on her tits. Nathan tells him he should sneak into Alisha’s bedroom when she isn’t there and surprise her. Nathan gives terrible advice, and going to Curtis under the circumstances doesn’t seem like a good idea, so Simon tries to stop listening to Nathan and talk to Kelly instead.

“She likes talking to you,” Kelly tells him. “She says you’re a good listener.”

That seems ridiculous to him, that him sitting there and listening while Alisha tells stories about parties with Chloe (who is fun but a bitch sometimes) and Ellie (who is a proper slag) could be all Alisha wants from him. It’s not even like it’s hard. He’s always liked listening to her. 

He tries to listen extra-hard after that, even so.

*

The part of the whole deal that seems easiest to him is the bit where he’s going to die for Alisha. He doesn’t mind that at all. He could do that bit right now.

*

There’s one other part that’s easy, which is that he can’t touch Alisha. 

No one can touch Alisha, because of her power. Which means it is unremarkable that he never tries to. 

He never has to try to touch her, and fail. Never has to watch her be disgusted by him. Never has to take his wanting to touch her, and put it next to her wanting not to be touched, and look at the gap between the two.

Except that Alisha tells him that in the future, he’ll be able to touch her. And when she says that, her face gets vulnerable in a way he hasn’t seen before, and her pupils dilate and her mouth gets soft. 

She doesn’t say exactly in what way the guy in the mask touched her, and he doesn’t ask. But he puts together that she has certain expectations there. Expectations she must know he can’t possibly fulfill.

Does he even want to touch her? Simon supposes he probably does. Alisha looks like someone it would be amazing to touch. It looks like her skin would be soft and her body would curve firmly against yours. It looks like she would smell like flowers — 

— and sweat. Alisha smells like flowers and sweat. He knows this because he stared at her changing in the locker room while he was invisible, and he smelled her then.

He can’t get to the wanting to touch her. He can’t access it. If he even has it, anymore. It’s buried somewhere under all those layers of shame that came to him after Sally. It should be buried. He doesn’t deserve to touch her.

The nearest he can get to it is a desire to be watching Alisha while she touches herself. He would like to watch Alisha’s pretty painted fingers disappear inside of herself while she moans and her big hazel eyes go hazy. He would like to see that in detail. He would like to be invisible while it happens, so that she can’t see him. He would like her never to see him — not while that happens — so she never has to be disappointed with him.

Sometimes he thinks about Alisha in bed with the guy in the mask. 

The guy in the mask never has his face when he thinks about this. Just that mask, with the blank reflective visor over his eyes so no one can look inside. Simon thinks about Alisha wrapping her long smooth legs around the guy in the mask in that black speedsuit, and her eyes going dark and her mouth going soft the way they did when she said he’d be able to touch her some day.

He wouldn’t mind seeing that, he thinks. But only if he were invisible the whole time.

When he sees Alisha in real life, he is careful to keep a foot of distance between them.

*

She still watches him the way she did before, in that waiting, searching way. The way she started to when the guy in the mask came, Simon supposes, and she came to the conclusion that Simon was going to turn into someone worth spending her time on someday. 

She’s waiting for Simon to turn into the guy in the mask, so he will be worth it. He doesn’t know how to tell her that it’s terrifying to watch her wait like that.

Sometimes he thinks he would like to turn to her and say, “Look, it’s fine. It’s obvious that someone, somewhere in the universe, made a mistake and violated the natural order of things. You were meant to be with a superhero, and you were, and then something went all wrong and now you’re trapped with me. You’re trying to make the best of things, but you don’t have to. I understand. I’ll let you alone.”

He doesn’t. He is selfish. He likes being around her too much.

*

Simon likes seeing Alisha smiling at him every day. He likes listening to her party stories. He likes it when she insults his music. He likes how when one of her customers orders a drink she thinks is too complicated — which is anything with more steps than a gin and tonic — she wrinkles her nose and rolls her eyes at them, and then looks bored when the manager shouts at her. He likes the way she always looks proud of herself when she gets him to laugh, like she’s keeping score in her head. 

It’s so hard, trying to work out what she wants from him. But he’ll try, as long as he gets to keep sitting there watching her try to make him laugh. He’ll keep trying forever, until he dies.

*

One of the ways that Alisha is better than other people — and there are a lot of ways — is that when she’s not trying to avoid a time paradox she’s very straightforward with him. Which he supposes is something he already knew about her: that she doesn’t bother with games. He forgot it, in all his confusion about her secret.

She tells him that she would like to hold his hand. He buys gloves and puts them on, even though he was right before about gloves being inconvenient, and next time he sees her she links their hands together and smiles brilliantly. Her hands are warm, even through the gloves.

Maybe it can always be that easy to do what she wants. Maybe it can always be that easy to touch her.

Simon thinks that should be a rule. He thinks it’s a really good rule. He makes it one: _If Alisha says she wants something, and you can do it for her, do it._

She tells him she thinks they should move in together and they do.

*

The parkour starts to get better, but also worse. Better, because he can actually do some of the moves now. He can do the rolls and the jumps. Worse, because that means he has to start trying them out in real conditions. Like a rooftop.

He falls down a lot. He gets injured a lot. He feels like an absolute fucking twat. He keeps doing it.

*

It takes him a while to work out that Alisha does not actually expect him to go back in time and die for her. “You already did that,” she says, meaning, he supposes, that the guy in the mask already did that. 

It surprises him. She must think that whatever he’s doing is the kind of time travel Curtis does, where the deaths aren’t permanent, like that timeline where they all became famous and then they all died, but it was fine because Curtis undid it all. But it’s clear to Simon that this is entirely different. 

It’s like the difference, he tries to explain, between John Connor sending Kyle Reese back in _Terminator 1_ to do something that always would have happened, because it’s an infinite loop, and John Connor sending a Terminator back in _Terminator 2_ in order to change the past, because it’s a branching timeline. It’s always bothered Simon that the time travel rules change from film to film, but it’s actually convenient in this case because he thinks they make a very clear analogy.

Alisha has never seen the _Terminator_ films, any of them, and has no interest in changing that now. She tells him, very firmly, that he’s not going back, and it’s clear she considers the matter closed.

Alisha’s a good person, and she’s saved his life before. So she doesn’t like the idea of him going back in time to die. But if Simon doesn’t go back, then no one will be there to save Alisha’s life when the video game guy shoots at her. And anyone can see that if only one of them can still be alive it should be Alisha. 

Besides: She told him the other him said it had to be this way. And Simon knows himself well enough to know that means it has to be this way for all of him. 

The other him must have worked it all out. The same way Simon’s working it out right now. He put together that this was the only way he and Alisha could be together: him becoming special enough to win her over, going back in time and doing it, and then dying, so she’d turn to the present him. This is the only way it happens. How could it otherwise? What else would ever make Alisha notice him? He’d never become someone worth her time on his own, that’s clear enough.

So he’ll have to be prepared to do the same thing the other him did, if he wants her. This is the price he has to pay to be with Alisha. He has to die for her.

It makes sense to Simon. That’s the way life is, in his experience. If you want something good, you have to be willing to deal with something terrible, too. Like, you’ll actually find real friends at community service, but only after you do the very worst thing you’ve ever done and kill a girl. You actually do get to have superpowers, and yes, they’re a bit shit, but if you put in the work and the time, you’ll learn how to control them and find things to do with them. You just have to be willing to cover up the occasional accidental murder, too.

You actually do get to be with the girl you’re in love with. If you’re willing to die for her.

And Simon is willing.

*

It’s so strange, being around her all the time now. She is so beautiful and she is so good and she is so far out of his league, but also she is so fucking messy. How is it possible for someone to live their life with dishes lingering in the sink for days on end?

Simon is used to disappearing into the sterile order of his room and shutting the door when the world gets to be too much. He is used to staying there for a day or two or three if he likes, if no better plans occur to him. But that’s not possible anymore, because the lair has no dividing walls, and Alisha is everywhere. All around him.

Simon wakes up once in the middle of the night and Alisha is curled against him, fast asleep. There are two layers of blankets between their bodies but the heat of her is blazing against him, and he can feel the warmth of her everywhere she presses: her face and hands against his chest, knees against his thighs, feet on his calves. Her hair is gathered into a bun on top of her head and stray strands brush against his face. She looks softer when she sleeps, all her brilliance tamped down and stored away till morning. 

It occurs to him, suddenly, that he would like to kiss her.

*

Alisha is on edge. She has been putting uncharacteristic energy into keeping her patience with him until now, but after they’ve been living together a couple weeks that energy seems to drain away. She snaps at him more, and rolls her eyes at him when he tidies up around the place. He feels surlier himself; can’t stop himself from looking pointedly at all her messes, from sighing every time he sees a dish in the sink. 

Kelly marches up to him at the bar one day and says, “You need to fucking shag your girlfriend, mate. She’s hard to block out when she’s frustrated and no offense, but I don’t need these pictures in my head.”

He blanches and says nothing, and he doesn’t say anything to Alisha either.

*

Simon tries to consider touching Alisha. Cannot quite bring himself to do it: him next to her, her so perfect and him so inferior and off-putting — no, he can’t do it.

He tries to consider sex without touch. That setup she and Curtis had, which sounds overwhelmingly embarrassing. On his end, not hers, obviously. 

But surely that can’t be the only way to have sex with someone without touching them. The internet is full of different ideas about ways to have sex and not all of them involve skin contact. And by this point he’s watched videos of most of them.

A number of different possibilities suggest themselves to him.

*

Alisha tells him, point black, that she thinks they should have sex.

_If Alisha says she wants something, and you can do it for her, do it._

They try it. It’s terrible.

She tells him they should try again.

They try again. It’s better.

She tells him they should try again.

*

Alisha is delighted with herself, with him. She starts to play a game where when she whispers in his ear now, she is trying to make him blush: telling him things she would like to do to him, things she would like him to do to her. She succeeds at making him blush very easily, nearly every time she tries. Then she crows with triumph.

She is surprisingly possessive. She tells him, “No one else knows how good you’re getting at this, just me.” She says, “You’re only mine.”

The wanting to touch her is close to him all the time now. She coaxes it out from under the shame, bit by bit, and now Simon’s days are full of wanting to touch the hollow of her knee, the crook of her shoulder, the bow of her upper lip. 

It’s so good, the wanting to touch her. The ways she does not touch him, the ways she lets him not touch her. The ways she tells him she wants him. It starts to feel real.

It’s so good he stops thinking about dying for her all the time because he is thinking about touching her all the time instead. Which frightens him a little, when he notices it, because if he’s not prepared to die for her then what is he even there for?

*

What is frustrating about parkour is that all the websites and videos and books are right: it does get easier with practice. After day after day slogging through the same movements in relentless, mindless drills he can feel himself getting faster and stronger. 

But he still isn’t remotely strong or fast enough to do anything actually impressive. Everytime he tries there’s another bruise or scrape across his skin, and Alisha’s worried face when she sees it.

She tells him she’s worried he’ll hurt himself for real, which is probably true. She never tells him that she’s disappointed in him, or that he needs to get better faster if he expects her to stick around, or that she’s worried he’ll never turn into the guy in the mask and she’ll have wasted all her time and energy on him. 

He can’t stop himself from thinking that she probably does think so, anyway, at least some of the time.

*

Simon has been operating under the expectation that when he is finally able to actually touch Alisha, it will be because he has been working on acquiring some sort of immunity to her power, so he will have fair warning and be able to prepare himself properly. So it surprises him when she comes home just before Christmas, fizzing with giddiness, and tells him she’s sold her power away.

She looks up at him with her eyes giant and shining and dark and tells him to kiss her, and he follows his rule and he does.

Alisha’s mouth is soft and hot and her lips are firm against his. Alisha’s skin is silky and the soft curves of Alisha’s body press against him and the flowers that Alisha smells like are freesias. Alisha strips off both their clothes and touches him everywhere.

It’s so good. It’s overwhelmingly good. It’s too good. 

*

Afterwards, he can’t stop thinking about Alisha in bed with the guy in the mask. Her legs around his waist while the mask digs into the crook of her shoulder. Alisha tossing her head back, moaning low in the back of her throat.

He doesn’t want to stand invisible in the corner and watch anymore. He resents the guy in the mask more than anyone in the world.

*

He would like to kill his future self himself. He would like to say, “What the fuck were you thinking? Why would you tell her so much, all these things, set so many expectations? How could you leave me in this position?”

Alisha tells him his future self said they would all sell their powers so he sells his invisibility away.

*

Nathan tells him it’s fine and he shouldn’t worry too much about it and Alisha’s so disgustingly gone on him she won’t even care, which is surprisingly reassuring. Nathan also tells him that he should use a cough sweet as a sex aid, which Simon has to consider strongly before he concludes it’s probably a bad idea.

*

Alisha tells him he needs to practice and they’re going to try again so he tries again. It’s better.

*

They get new powers, and he practices using his and he practices parkour and he practices touching her. 

Alisha says, “I’m going to teach you everything there is to know about this,” and they lock themselves up in the lair for a weekend and they turn off their phones and he practices touching her.

They go to Las Vegas, and Alisha dances down the Strip under neon lights and they take the picture in front of the sign and he practices touching her.

Alisha says, “You’re doing really well.” She says, “Yes, just like that.” She says, “Would you fucking lie back and let me do the work for once.” She says nothing at all, because in all this practice he has learned that when he touches her a certain way she stops being able to speak.

*

Sometimes he has nightmares that he doesn’t go back in time to save her and a bullet hole appears in her chest in the present and she dies right in front of him. Or he doesn’t go back in time and he wakes up one morning and finds her lying dead in the bed next to him. 

The worst are when he doesn’t go back in time and she vanishes. Just ceases to be a part of reality, disappears from existence. 

What would he do then? What would he have? There would be nothing left for him. He might as well just drop dead himself.

*  
He gets the suit and the mask, and he puts them on and looks in the mirror. The guy in the mask looks back at him.

*

A boy who was in love with Alisha in school shows up and Alisha gets sick with guilt that she was cruel to him. “I’m not that person anymore,” she tells him, and it’s so strange how she doesn’t like who she used to be anymore than he likes who he used to be. But he also understands it, because he remembers that she was the one who showed him it was possible to make yourself better than you were in the first place, way back at the beginning of community service. He learned how to make rules for himself by watching her.

He thinks maybe the point of all this is that they can keep being better together, keep turning into the best versions of themselves and be together while they do it, so they bring out the best parts of each other again and again and again. He thinks maybe he’s started to understand something very important.

Then he remembers that’s not going to happen, because it can’t be much longer now before he goes back to die for her. He’s getting better at parkour every day. 

*

They get community service again, which isn’t what he’d necessarily prefer to be doing for the last few months of his life but isn’t the worst thing he can imagine either. He’s with Alisha all day this way, and with Kelly and Curtis. And with Rudy, who he doesn’t particularly mind, although he does miss Nathan. He likes being part of a group still. He likes spending time with them, and dealing with all the weird shit that seems to find them every time they do community service.

He reminds himself that everybody dies eventually. Most people don’t get to be happy at all before they die. He could have lived a long life without ever getting caught in this time loop, but what would that have been worth? Alisha would never have looked twice at him then. He tells himself he’s lucky.

He thinks about dying for Alisha. He thinks about how his life will matter, then, like a superhero’s life, because it will all have been for someone who matters. Alisha matters, more than anything. More than him.

He thinks maybe dying for Alisha will be beautiful.

*

He saves a boy from a mugger, and the boy says Simon is a superhero. 

It feels astonishing. It feels like Alisha smiling at him. It feels like: You thought you were worthless. But now there’s this.

Alisha is furious with him, though, when he tells her what he did. When she sees what the mugger did to his hand. She doesn’t like him taking risks. She doesn’t like him training. She still doesn’t think he’s going back in time, no matter how often he explains it to her. She tells him if he goes back it’s the same as him splitting up with her, which he would never, ever do.

Alisha is the best person there is to talk to about most things, because even when she doesn’t understand she always listens. And it usually helps that she thinks about things so differently to the way he does, because it’s like she confuses him out of his head and into someplace more interesting. But Simon does think sometimes it would be nice to talk about time travel with someone who actually gets what genre they’re all living in.

Not that he ever actually would. He can’t tell anyone about the time loop, because his future self said not to. And the whole point of this thing is he has to follow the rules his future self laid out. If he doesn’t, he could ruin it all.

But then the boy he saved from the muggers shows up at the community center. And, very strangely, Simon finds himself telling the boy everything.

*

When Alisha and the others tear up Peter’s pictures, Simon feels like his mind is being ripped in two. 

It’s so strange: one minute he’s in this hazy, woozy dreamstate, from which he can see and hear as if from a great distance while his body carries on saying things and doing things without his participation, and he himself can rest cozily in the knowledge that he has no decisions to make or choices to face, because all of that has been taken care of for him. And then the next, there’s a great jagged tear across the fabric of his brain, and he’s leaping, disoriented, back into full awareness.

He split up with Alisha, is the first thing he realizes. He split up with Alisha, and then he attacked the group, and he pushed her. He pushed her to the ground. He pushed her to the ground so hard she lost consciousness for a second. He did it on purpose.

No he didn’t. He wouldn’t ever. It wasn’t on purpose. He doesn’t do that sort of thing. Not after Sally. 

He did do that sort of thing. But only once, and it was an accident, and he has promised, he has sworn, he has told himself over and over again he’ll never be like that with any other girl and especially never Alisha. That’s why he has the rules.

Only one rule now, really, since he’s more or less stopped thinking about the rest. But it’s such a good rule, it’s the most important rule of all: _If Alisha tells you what she wants, and you can do it, do it._

Alisha. He hurt Alisha. He split up with Alisha. He made her cry. He _pushed_ her. He broke the rules so badly, worse than he ever has before. 

But how could he? Why would he? Why would he ever? 

He told Alisha that he wanted to stop seeing her. He can’t wrap his mind around it. It’s like how when they first started dating he would try to tell himself they were and he couldn’t grasp hold of it: like that, only worse. Because even then at least he always knew he wanted to be with Alisha. He can’t imagine wanting not to be with her. He can’t imagine what he was thinking.

She is the reason his life is good now. She is the only thing that matters. She is all of his life. How could he do that to her? What will he do without her? What is left of his life?

Alisha comes back to the lair, and there’s a bruise on her forehead from where she hit it when he pushed her to the ground, but she looks right at him and her eyes are clear and bright and so open. 

She tells him it isn’t his fault. That Peter has a power, and he used it on Simon. She lets him hold her, and she whispers in his ear over and over again, “It wasn’t you, Simon. It wasn’t you.”

*

Fact: Simon has wanted to be a superhero most of his life.

Further fact: when Simon tells Peter that superheroes aren’t his fantasy anymore, he believes that he is telling the truth.

*

Alisha tells him to promise her he’s not going to go back and die for her and he does. 

He did like the idea. He’ll admit that. He liked the idea of having a destiny that was noble and tragic and heroic. He liked the idea of making his life — his terrible, depressing waste of a life — finally mean something. By sacrificing it for something really important. Something like love. 

He liked the idea of making sure that Alisha would fall in love with him, eventually, no matter what point in the time loop he was in. He liked the idea of ensuring the loop, preserving it. Keeping it safe so that no matter what happens, he would know that somewhere in the universe, there would be a point in time in which Alisha tells him she loves him. And time is infinite, so if it happens once, it’s like it’s always happening. He doesn’t think there’s a way he can be sure of that without dying for it. So he’ll just have to do without that, now.

He even sort of liked the idea of Alisha grieving over him, but understanding that it was all for the best. And then eventually moving on and marrying someone amazing who deserved her — someone like Curtis, or Bruce Wayne — but always holding a special place in her heart for him, because after all if someone dies for you then you can’t just forget them like they didn’t mean anything. She would name her firstborn son after him, probably, and put flowers on his grave once a year, and it would be beautiful.

But he has been thinking more and more lately: maybe his life can mean something without a tragic heroic death. Maybe it isn’t all a waste. Maybe his life can just be a life.

Maybe it can just be him and Alisha, not being superheroes or trapped by fate, but just living their lives. Getting off the estate and seeing the world like they did with Las Vegas, or even staying on the estate for another fifty years and never leaving again, but just doing it together, always. Growing together. Making each other be better people together. 

And maybe the loop will fall apart. Maybe he’s the only version of himself that will get to live this timeline. The best timeline. But that could be all right, if that’s what Alisha wants. 

Because when he tried to live his life like he was going to die for Alisha, he only ended up breaking his biggest rule. He hurt her. So that can’t have been the right thing to do. 

She tells him she wants him to stay with her and not go back, not ever. So he won’t. It’s as simple as that.

He does keep the suit, though. Sort of as a souvenir, of that time he thought he was actually going to be a superhero. And maybe just a little bit in case something unexpected happens, and he needs it again someday. Even though she tells him to burn it. 

He’s breaking the rule. Still. An exception here or there never hurt anybody.

And anyway, she never has to know. So what’s the harm?

*

Alisha doesn’t look at him like she’s waiting for him to change anymore. She just looks at him like he is someone she likes to look at.

He’s not quite sure when she stopped. It must have happened very gradually. Sometime before their new community service started, he thinks. Maybe before that. Maybe even before they went to Las Vegas.

He can’t tell if she’s stopped because he’s actually done it, he’s gone and become his future self. Or if it’s because she’s decided she likes being with him the way he is now and she doesn’t need him to become the guy in the mask after all.

He supposes it doesn’t matter either way, because after all he’s made up his mind now that he’s not going to go back in time, so it’s all right if he’s not the guy in the mask as long as Alisha doesn’t mind. But he still isn’t sure which explanation he’d rather were true.

*

Kelly walks into community service one day and tells them she’s just come back from an alternate timeline where they all had to fight the Nazis. She tells them the whole story at the bar that night, although Simon suspects she is embellishing liberally when it comes to the number of times she says Hitler screamed — “just like a whiny little bitch, because that’s what he is, isn’t he” — while she battered him.

If Kelly had told this story a week ago, Simon would have taken a personal interest. He would have thought a lot about how it shows that you can’t get caught up in trying to change a timeline, because even when you mean to do good you’re so likely to make things worse, and probably the best thing to do overall is just keep it all on track and make sure everything that’s supposed to happen does. Batter Hitler, but don’t get clever and try to kill him. Make Alisha fall in love with you, but don’t get clever and try to survive the experience.

But Kelly is telling this story now, when Simon has made up his mind not to go back in time. The rules of the genre don’t matter: he is going to break them all, because that’s what Alisha wants. He reminds himself of this decision firmly.

“The two of you still got together there,” Kelly adds as an afterthought, gesturing to him and Alisha. “When you joined up with the resistance in the end, you were all holding hands and shit. It was dead sweet, actually, apart from how there were Nazis and swastikas all over.”

Alisha smiles at that in the way she does when she is pleased to the point of feeling embarrassed about it, her whole face going soft and her eyes lighting up as she looks down at her pretty painted hands. He never sees her smile like that for anyone else but him. 

“I think we always end up together,” she tells him that night. “In all the timelines.”

Simon doesn’t think that’s true at all. He thinks that every timeline where he gets something that good, he must have to deal with something else, because how else would the universe balance itself out? You get Alisha, but you also get conscripted into the Nazi army. You get Alisha, but you also have to die for her. Or decide you won’t die for her, because she tells you not to, and live with the consequences. 

In any timeline where his life is anything resembling normal, he doesn’t see how Alisha would ever look twice at him.

He doesn’t think Alisha would appreciate this idea. So instead he says, “I know I fall in love with you in all of them,” which he is sure must be true. 

*

Kelly gets body-swapped and the girl in her body stabs their third probation worker. Simon thinks about when he killed Sally, and the rule he made after that, about how you should be careful to remember other people are human, and treat them accordingly. So even though Kelly said Shaun acted like a right wankstain in the alternate Nazi timeline, Simon lies to Shaun and tells him he will be fine, and he holds his hand while he dies.

They’re really getting very good at killing their probation workers.

*

Sally comes back.

Not back to life. She comes back as a ghost.

Sally comes back, and she tells him, again, that he is different from the others. She smiles at him, and she tells him, again, that he is special. Which she told him the first time before he became better. Before he learned all the rules. Before Alisha ever noticed him. Sally thought he was worth her time before any of that. 

She tells him that she loves him.

She tells him that he owes her, because he killed her.

Killing Sally is still the worst thing Simon has ever done.

*

When Sally kisses him, he kisses her back. When she undoes her dress and pushes him onto the bed, he lets her.

There are codes, aren’t there?

He hasn’t read about what to do when you kill a girl and then her spirit comes back and tells you that you owe her. Probably there aren’t any guides for this sort of thing. But surely you are supposed to do what she asks? If you killed her, and now she’s stuck haunting the community center and it’s all your fault, and she thinks this can help her pass on? Surely?

But then she climbs on top of him in her knickers and kisses him again, and he can’t do it. Cannot. 

All he can see is Alisha’s face, and all he can hear is Alisha’s voice, and he can’t. He can’t do it. Even if it’s wrong. 

Killing Sally is the worst thing he’s ever done, but even if this will make it better, he can’t do it. 

He still has his most important rule of all, which is that if Alisha wants something he does it. She wouldn’t want this, so he doesn’t do it.

*

Alisha finds out, somehow.

Not that he didn’t have sex with Sally, but that he kissed her, in their bed. And then she thinks he did have sex with Sally, for some reason.

She cries. She says, “I trusted you.” She looks at him like she doesn’t recognize him. She tells him not to touch her.

It’s worse than that time with Peter when he split up with her, because that wasn’t really him, and he didn’t know what he was doing then. He knows now, and he did it anyway.

*

Sally almost kills Alisha, just to hurt him. But then she doesn’t, because Tony tells her she doesn’t need revenge to be happy, and then she cries and kisses him and both of them vanish, and Alisha is safe.

Alisha is safe, and when he tells her what actually happened, she forgives him. Her eyes go clear and liquid and bright, and she holds onto him like she will never let him go.

When they all come down from the roof, she smiles sidewise at him and pulls him into the showers and unzips her jumpsuit. He takes her against the shower wall, and when she comes, she laughs, looking up at him like they’re in on a secret together. Which he supposes they are: the two of them, and what they’re doing, there in the showers. That’s the secret.

“I love you,” she tells him.

That’s the moment he’d like to freeze in time. That’s the moment that he would like to last forever.

*

After Alisha dies, killing Sally is not the worst thing Simon has ever done anymore. Going back is.


	3. Part 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “That’s so sad,” Alisha says when she sees the butterfly case. “Don’t you think? They’re supposed to be flying around and instead you’ve got them all trapped in there.” 
> 
> “Well, they’re all dead, anyway,” Simon says.

She is so much younger now.

He doesn’t actually go back that far. It seems like such a long time to him but really it’s only been months. Not even a year.

But they’re all different. He is different, which he knew he would be. But so is Alisha, which he didn’t realize she would be. 

She is younger, and she is harder, somehow. More sparkling, more brittle. She laughs a lot, but her eyes don’t light up when she does. 

She’s happier when she’s with him. So that’s something he can give her. 

He’s going to change her. Alisha always seemed older than he was, even when he thought he was mature. But this her hasn’t grown up yet, because the thing that’s going to make her grow up is him dying. She told him once it was the worst thing she ever lived through, and he is going to do that to her. He is not going to stop it from happening.

*

Curtis pulled him aside before he went back.

“You can still change this,” Curtis said. “I know, all right? I’ve done it. It’s hard; maybe you’ll have to redo it a few times; but you can still get to a timeline where neither one of you dies.”

“That’s not what happens,” Simon said.

“It doesn’t have to be the way the last you did it,” Curtis said. “You can at least try. If you do it this way, you’re only giving her, what, a few months more? Come on, man. She deserves better than that.”

Which is true. Alisha does deserve better than just a few more months, and all of them spent with him. Alisha deserves to live a hundred years, and then die in bed in her sleep, peaceful and surrounded by everyone she loves, not — not the way she did. 

But Simon is not able to give that to her.

Curtis could, maybe. Curtis is a genuinely good person. Curtis could be a proper superhero. Simon can’t be.

“It’s like what happened with the Nazis,” Simon said. “When you try to fix a timeline, you end up just creating a world where everything’s gone wrong. It’s better to just leave it be. Make sure everything happens the way it’s supposed to. Anything I do to change it will only make it worse.”

“You don’t know that,” Curtis said. “You can’t know that until you try.”

“It has to be this way,” Simon said.

And what he thought was: _Thank god. Thank god it has to be this way. Thank god I get to keep this. Thank god I get to die looking at her._

*  
He is putting her in the freezer like Sally. Simon knows that. He knows what he is doing. He makes his choices in the full awareness of their consequences.

He is freezing the time loop. He is making certain that it always happens. He is making certain that Alisha always falls in love with him, that she always makes him better, that she always makes him the man who will go back in time and make her fall in love with him. He is making certain that there is always a moment in time happening where Alisha tells him she loves him.

That is not what Alisha wanted. Alisha never wanted to be frozen. Alisha was bright and brilliant and always moving, and she wanted to always keep moving forward, always keep changing and growing and turning into something better.

But that wouldn’t be happening in any case, because Alisha is dead. And Simon is not going to live in a world where Alisha is dead. He can’t.

So instead he’s built a freezer, and he’s climbing inside, and he’s pulling her in with him. He is pinning her to the walls of time like a butterfly. 

It’s breaking his biggest rule. _If Alisha tells you what she wants, and you can give it to her, do it._

She told him, flat out told him, that she did not want this. He should be giving her what she wants. 

Simon is selfish. He can’t give her that.

It’s not breaking the rule if it’s something he genuinely cannot do.

*  
He saves Nathan from Rachel’s cult, and he watches Nathan kill Rachel.

He could save Rachel’s life. Find a way out, a way to break the brainwashing that doesn’t kill her. Drag her to Seth, make Seth drain her power away. He could keep her from dying, and that would keep her from turning into a ghost with a box cutter in her hands and Alisha an arm’s length away.

He doesn’t do that. He keeps the timeline intact and he watches Rachel die.

*

He sends Kelly to Nathan’s grave to dig him out. He saves Curtis from Lucy. He watches Alisha look for Curtis. 

Her hair is shorter than it was the last time he saw her, and darker, and she’s doing something different with her makeup, he thinks, which is maybe part of why she looks so young to him. Young and sad and lonely. It’s amazing how all that time he was falling in love with her he never realized she was as lonely as he was. 

*

He follows Alisha through the estate, and he watches her watch him. He remembers what her face looked like to the other him as she watched the video she’s making right now, the one of him free-running off a roof: impressed, a little flushed. 

She’s interested. She likes the romance of a mysterious masked man watching her. She and Curtis are drifting away from each other.

He can do this. He can make her fall in love with him.

*

He saves Nathan from the car fire. He leads his other self to Nikki’s flat. Very soon, Nikki will be dead. He doesn’t do anything to stop that. By then he’ll be dead, too.

*

He saves Alisha from a mugger, and he touches her hand, and she looks at him like he’s electrified her.

“You’re … touching me,” she says. “Who are you?”

He thinks, absurdly, _I don’t know my line._

It surprises him. He didn’t expect it, that she could surprise him like that. Since after all she’s dead.

He runs away from her.

*

Alisha dangles herself out as bait to attract his attention. After all those times she told him off for putting himself in danger. And then she goes and knocks herself out on top of that. 

He never expected that. He never knew she did anything like that. She never told him.

She didn’t really talk about any of it much, any of what she is about to do with this him. Because it made her too sad to talk about it. He is going to make her sad. He knows that. He is going through with all of it anyway.

*

Alisha sees his face and realizes who he is. She puts the situation together pretty quickly after that, but then he supposes she’s dated a time traveler before.

She says, “You’re so different,” and her eyes flick up and down over him, considering. Speculative. So this is when she starts looking at him like that.

He pushes her hair out of her face to look at her bruise, and she catches her breath and goes so still. No one has touched her in so long. She is so lonely. 

He can fix that. He is doing that for her. He is going to give her something beautiful.

And then he is going to die in her arms. He is going to give her something beautiful, and then he is going to give her the worst day of her life. And then, months later, she is going to die.

*

The day Alisha buys the other him a soda and tells him she’s sorry if she was a bitch to him, he gives her back the necklace the mugger took. She blushes and smiles at him and says, “You told me I was beautiful today.”

It surprises him, that that’s how she remembers that day. He’s always thought of Alisha as someone who knew she was beautiful. He never knew him saying that meant anything to her.

He tells her she’s going to fall in love with him, and she tells him to fuck off, and he thinks, _How could I ever live without you?_

*

He tells her so many lies. 

He lets her think they’ll all end up famous. He tells her it will all work out fine in the end. He tells her he’s not going to let her die.

And he’s not, this time. This time he’s going to die for her. 

But when the next time comes, Alisha will die right in front of him, and it will be over before he can blink, and he won’t even know what’s happened before it’s too late. He is going to let her die. He is letting her die right now. He is not doing anything to stop it.

*

When she kisses him for the first time, her hands are shaking. The way his were when he kissed her for the first time.

*

He gets her into the bed, and she is overwhelmed. He knows her well enough to know that. He pushes her onto her back, does all the work. He can give her this, something good. This is what all that practice was for, in the end.

When she comes, she sounds surprised. By the pleasure of it. By the contact, when it’s been so long for her. By the fact that it’s him, maybe.

She is so happy, afterwards. As happy as he’s ever seen her. Skin flushed, eyes like lamps. She won’t stop touching him. Won’t let him stop touching her. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she says, laughing, “but you’re way better at that than I was expecting.”

*

She comes to see him all the time. Knocks on the wall of the lift, since she doesn’t have a key yet. Comes in already undoing her buttons, kisses him right away, wastes no time pushing him to the bed. 

Afterwards sometimes she putters around the lair, wearing his hoodie as a dressing gown. She never did that before, so he supposes it must remind her of this him, and be one of the things that makes her sad.

She tells him the lair is depressing, which is true, but it’s differently depressing for him to the way it is for her. She means that it’s bare, that he should put up some artwork, get some better lighting. He would, but all the lamps in the lair were hers, which means she still has them in her room in her parents’ house.

He thinks about the time he followed her here invisibly and watched her curl up on the bed and look at the Vegas picture and cry, and he supposes he’s doing the same thing now. Only she wasn’t hurting him when she did it, and he is hurting her right now.

But he is also making her happy, and he is allowed to have that, surely?

He touches her, and she shivers and blushes and smiles up at him. He tells her she is beautiful, and she laughs and says, “You’re such a smooth talker, and when did you learn that?” He goes out in his suit to keep the timeline on track, and she doesn’t get worried or angry the way she did in his present when he went out training. Instead she just looks him up and down like he is something to eat and tells him to come back to her quickly.

He always comes back to her as fast as he can. 

On the wall, the clocks are counting down all the minutes he has left with her.

*

He puts up a butterfly case on his wall because why not. He’s always liked them. And he remembers seeing it when he first got to the lair, which means it’s supposed to be there.

Alisha tilts her head to the side when she sees it. “That’s so sad,” she says. “Don’t you think? They’re supposed to be flying around and instead you’ve got them all trapped in there.” 

“Well, they’re all dead, anyway,” he says, and she wrinkles her nose at him and tells him he’s being creepy.

*

On the last day, Alisha tells him she’s always wanted to go to Las Vegas. He tells her he’ll take her there, which isn’t a lie, for once. She smiles at him, and it’s not a special smile. It’s just the way Alisha always smiles at him, which is perfect. And then she kisses him.

This is perfect. This moment is perfect. This is what he gets to have. This is what he is doing all of it for: for this moment.

In four hours, thirty-two minutes, and eighteen seconds, he is going to fall in front of a bullet. He is going to die in her arms. She is going to be the last thing he ever sees.

He is going to break her heart. And then she’ll start to look at the other him, and she will fall in love with that him. And time will start again, and this moment will happen again. It will always keep happening. It will always be real.

He did that. He kept the loop intact for that, just for that. Even though she told him, again and again, it wasn’t what she wanted. Even though he’s breaking the only rule left, the only one that really matters.

It’s the worst thing he’s ever done. He would do it again. He will do it again. Every time she dies, he will do this again and again and again.

*

Fact: Simon has wanted to be a superhero for most of his life.

Further fact: On the day that he dies, he knows that he is very, very far from being a superhero.


End file.
